The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 by Deborah Blum Page B

don’t feel like taking any more unnecessary risks.”
    Many insisted that should the fruit be approved, it ought to be labeled.
    That morning Kress drove to work late. He should not be surprised by the hostility, he told himself.
    Irey tried to console him with good news: the data on the honeybees and mice had come back. The highest dose of the protein the EPA wanted tested had produced no ill effect.
    But the magnitude of the opposition had never hit Kress so hard. “Will they believe us?” he asked himself for the first time. “Will they believe we’re doing this to eliminate chemicals and we’re making sure it’s safe? Or will they look at us and say, ‘That’s what they all say’?”
    The major brands were rumored to be looking beyond Florida for their orange juice—perhaps to Brazil, where growers had taken to abandoning infected groves to plant elsewhere. Other experiments that Kress viewed as similar to his own had foundered. Pigs engineered to produce less-polluting waste had been euthanized after their developer at a Canadian university had failed to find investors. A salmon modified to grow faster was still awaiting FDA approval. A study pointing to health risks from GMOs had been discredited by scientists but was contributing to a sense among some consumers that the technology is dangerous.
    And while the California labeling measure had been defeated, it had spawned a ballot initiative in Washington State and legislative proposals in Connecticut, Missouri, New Mexico, Vermont, and many other states.
    In the heat of last summer, Kress gardened more savagely than his wife had ever seen.
    Driving through the Central Valley of California last October to speak at the California Citrus Growers meeting, Kress considered how to answer critics. Maybe even a blanket “GMO” label would be OK, he thought, if it would help consumers understand that he had nothing to hide. He could never prove that there were no risks to genetically modifying a crop. But he could try to explain the risks of not doing so.
    Southern Gardens had lost 700,000 trees trying to control the disease, more than a quarter of its total. The forecast for the coming spring harvest was dismal. The approval to use more pesticide on young trees had come through that day. At his hotel that night, he slipped a new slide into his standard talk.
    On the podium the next morning, he talked about the growing use of pesticides: “We’re using a lot of chemicals, pure and simple,” he said. “We’re using more than we’ve ever used before.”
    Then he stopped at the new slide. Unadorned, it read “Consumer Acceptance.” He looked out at the audience.
    What these growers wanted most, he knew, was reassurance that he could help them should the disease spread. But he had to warn them: “If we don’t have consumer confidence, it doesn’t matter what we come up with.”
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    Planting
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    One recent sunny morning, Kress drove to a fenced field, some distance from his office and far from any other citrus tree. He unlocked the gate and signed in, as required by Agriculture Department regulations for a field trial of a genetically modified crop.
    Just in the previous few months, Whole Foods had said that because of customer demand it would avoid stocking most GMO foods and require labels on them by 2018. Hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world had joined in a “March Against Monsanto”—and the Agriculture Department had issued its final report for this year’s orange harvest showing a 9 percent decline from last year, attributable to citrus greening.
    But visiting the field gave him some peace. In some rows were the trees with no new gene in them, sick with greening. In others were the three hundred juvenile trees with spinach genes, all healthy. In the middle were the trees that carried his immediate hopes: fifteen mature Hamlins and